The show that challenges presidents

For 12 years a radio and television news programme, Democracy Now, has survived and even flourished on a cobbled-together broadcast network that reaches all of the United States and out into the world. It has almost no paid resources, yet daily defies the corporate and government agendas, and has sometimes forced mainstream media into picking up its stories, if not its attitudes.

A small group of activists in the rural northeastern corner of Tennessee in the United States persuaded their local public radio station, WETS, to start broadcasting the progressive news-hour Democracy Now two years ago. This pocket of Appalachia would seem to be unwelcoming territory for such an endeavour, since the economically depressed farming and mining region votes overwhelmingly Republican – by as much as 75% in the last presidential election – and is, according to Joseph Fitsanakis, organiser of Democracy Now Tri-Cities (DNTC), “the kind of place where 30 years ago you couldn’t really do anything politically unless you were a Klan member”.

And there was an immediate response; some donors to the mostly listener-supported radio station, which is a partnership between East Tennessee State University and the listeners, warned that continued donations would depend on Democracy Now being taken off the air. It could have been much worse; Fitsanakis points out that in this part of the country, political activism has sometimes been met with personal attacks including bullets through windows and dog poisonings. “People that got involved in organising mining, the unionists, have a lot of that kind of story to tell you”.

One of DNTC’s main objectives is to have a network of vocal supporters in place in case a campaign is launched against the programme. But Democracy Now seems to have a good chance of surviving on its own merits. Despite the early objectors, overall reaction has been, according to WETS director Wayne Winkler, “most gratifying… The positive response has far outweighed the negative.” Although there has been some backlash against the programme, “we lost track of the numbers of people calling in to say they became first-time contributors because of Democracy Now”. It is now one of the most successful fundraisers for the station.

(2) The region has a rich history of labour activism, located not far from Matewan and Blair Mountain, West Virginia, the site of a 1921 battle between 15,000 armed miners and the National Guard that ended with the Air Force dropping shells on its own citizens. These labour movements have been collapsing since the 1950s, although there are still towns whose governments are controlled entirely by a single company. On August 13 2007, a gunman fired a bullet through the window of the radio station that broadcasts Democracy Now in Houston, narrowly missing a late-night DJ. In the 1970s the transmitter of this station was blown up twice by the Ku Klux Klan.

(4) The revenue comes from the direct donations of its supporters, not-for-profit foundations, modest broadcast fees from stations, and the sales of videos and paraphernalia such as coffee mugs and T-shirts.

(6) The Federal Communications Commission is trying to fast-track legislation that would lift the ban on a single company owning both a newspaper and a television or radio station in the same city: a similar attempt was thwarted by popular mobilisation in 2003. The FCC has also recently opened a rare window to receive applications from local not-for-profit organisations to be granted one of hundreds of new full-power FM radio frequencies, in rural areas, that it is making available for non-commercial and educational programming.

(8) Senior hosts on the government-subsidised NPR news programmes are paid about five times more than Goodman, while her counterparts on commercial television stations earn on average more than 100 times her salary.